Walera Martynchik’s paintings feel as though you’re seeing a level of unconsciousness that even Freud could not imagine, and with the striking uncertainty of being a puzzle within a puzzle. Martynchik’s paintings are abstract and surrealist, contemporary and chaotic, and somehow with an inexplicit order. In truth, you feel like you’re sinking into oblivion, and in an attempt to stay afloat you’ll need to grab hold of one of the 3D objects layered within Martynchik’s art.
Haydn, Portrait, 2019, Oil on Canvas. Series: The Magic – Reconstruction of Music. Walera Martynchik.
Martynchik’s unique style blends together his respect for science, mathematics, philosophy and the Soviet avant-garde movement (which he was involved with). This art-meld varying from 3D abstract-montages, sculptures, to portraits of universal layers, such as that of Einstein; his head encircled in a crown of holly – a touch maybe of religious iconology, worship even? But look again and there’s the crown from the statue of liberty peeking through, perhaps marking his immigration to America? While his face is formed of industrial and geometric shapes. Martynchik’s portraits, like the rest of his work, are compositional, symbolic and very clever in design, he’s influences in part come from a childhood where he was taught to embrace and digest factual forms such as dictionaries and the great soviet encyclopaedia. The images of what he read and saw in their pages issuing forth into his later art – holding a complexity of philosophy that not only admires great thinkers and their subjects, but as Martynchik states himself; an all-embracing Cosmic Consciousness – where a higher state of consciousness is reached, with infinite potential and an existence of everything. His ‘Multidimensions’ series in particular showing an investigative-nature into this wider spectrum of thoughts and a play of everything that has come and will be. A spiritual universe even that is ever-evolving, for example in the Holy Spirit (2009) the outline of a dove is formed by the creations and pattern within it.
Holy Spirit, 2009, Oil on Canvas. Series: Multidimensions. Walera Martynchik.
These multidimensional compositions, when partnered with his toy-box of colours, are somewhat reminiscent of Kadinsky’s Composition VII (1913) but Martynchik’s work seems to hold more order to it. In addition, by having a quality of being 3D over the more traditional 2D abstraction there’s more room for different layers to exist, and as such you feel there is more substantive forethought by the artist. Although I feel a computational devise, both of science’s mind and its matter, might be needed to fully comprehend an understanding of Martynchik’s art.
Having at one time been restricted with his artistic freedom – due to the Soviet Union’s repression on anything outside tradition and propaganda – Martynchik sought the underground-world of art, until artistic expression became more free and with it his work became more widely known to the international circuit.
Martynchik’s work, if it can be quantified, is a collection of everything known to creation. The strong usage of patterns, geometric shapes and everyday objects, somehow managing not to clash, but instead belong together, and with their heavy repetition – ironically give a sense of space. His canvas feeling as though it goes on indefinitely, much like the universes he’s sought to capture.
